Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (29 page)

ultimately transcended – battle-scarred Europe.

The British during these years made striking advances along a road paved

with enticing expectations of global empire.Nowhere was this more the

case than in the zone – virtually half the planet – of the “Pacific rim.”

Historians of international relations have underscored the importance to

the politics of this period of the contest for influence in the Pacific region.

8 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, pp.85–86.

9 Ibid., pp. 88–89.

116

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

They have, in doing so, chronicled the enormous strides taken by the British

in this connection.10 In the southwestern reaches of this enormous the-

ater, the British acquired Lord Howe Island in 1788 and, three years later,

Pitt Island and the Chatham Islands.Captains Bligh, Lever, Gilbert, and

Marshall discovered and charted insular lands; Lieutenant John Shortland

sailed along Guadalcanal and San Cristobal in 1789; and the Vancouver

expedition explored a stretch of the coast of New Zealand, discovered the

Chathams, and charted the Snares.11 Meanwhile, on the other side of the

Pacific, the imprisonment of three British merchantmen by Spanish author-

ities in May 1789 at Nootka Sound, situated on the west coast of Vancouver

Island, essentially resulted from “a collision between the relentless surge

of British commercial expansion and the traditional Spanish claim to a

monopoly of trade and settlement on the Pacific coast.”12 Here, of course,

was another story long familiar to those versed in issues of European and

global competition.

Of even greater moment, however, was the fact that the upshot of the

Nootka Sound incident – a Spanish capitulation to Pitt’s ministry on most

relevant points by October 1790 – signified a larger humiliation of France,

just as surely as had Madrid’s retreat over the Falkland Islands less than

two decades before.Once more the Spanish had looked to their Bourbon

confederate for support in the face of British naval and commercial

expansionism – and once again, the French had failed to assert themselves.

London’s victory over Madrid reflected both a “very successful naval

mobilisation, which was a measure of Britain’s recovery from the Anglo-

Bourbon struggle of 1778–83, and the diplomatic situation.Britain’s allies

had stood by her, conspicuously so in the case of the Dutch fleet, while

Spain had been unable to obtain reliable assistance.”13 As has often been

pointed out, ties between the Bourbon allies were now being strained

not only by geopolitical considerations – that is, Spanish perceptions of

French strategic weakness – but also by ideology – that is, Spanish fears of

revolutionary subversion emanating from the other side of the Pyrenees.

And all this was happening in the disheartening light of renewed British

assertiveness upon the high seas.

In his careful reappraisal of the impact of the Nootka Sound incident

upon Anglo-French relations, H.V.Evans has emphasized the undimin-

ished wariness of George III’s government toward Paris.Speaking off-the-

record to a colleague, William Pitt voiced his hope that a letter he had sent to

a British diplomat, Hugh Elliot, “steers quite clear of anything like
cringing

to France, which I agree with you ought to be avoided
even
in the present

10 Jeremy Black,
British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions, 1783–1793
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.252.

11 Ibid., pp. 252–54.

12 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, pp.61–62.

13 Black,
British Foreign Policy
, p.252.

The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution

117

moment of their weakness, and certainly in all others.” It was quite easy for

the prime minister’s ghost writer, James Burges, to portray him as saying:

“We have felt too strongly the immense advantage to be derived by this

country from such a state of anarchy and weakness as France is at present

plunged in, to be so mad as to interfere in any measure which may ...tend

to put France into the situation where ...she [would have] the power to

injure us.”14 Evans has noted that Pitt’s stance toward Paris throughout

this period remained “one of expediency.” Nootka Sound was, for him,

but one milepost along Britain’s road toward ever greater incursions into

American markets and the vast fisheries of the Pacific.He might conde-

scend, along the way, to “befriend” the powerless French “in anticipation

of breaking the Family Compact,” but not at the cost of a rapprochement

that could even faintly imply parity between London and Paris.15

The stunning decline of French influence that loomed behind Spanish

difficulties in the Americas and in Pacific waters manifested itself else-

where as well.In the West Indies, revolution broke out in the French

colonies, pitting slaves against masters.A leading sector of French over-

seas commerce was thus jeopardized.In the Middle East, Jeremy Black

has remarked, “Jezzar Ahmed Pasha, the governor of Palestine, felt able

to expel the French merchants who enjoyed a monopoly of Palestine’s ex-

ternal sea trade at the end of 1790, only inviting them back in 1791 on his

own terms.”16 Such were the diplomatic ramifications, in this strategic re-

gion, of growing Russian (and British) influence and of attenuated French

support for Turkey.Meanwhile, in the Far East, the intensifying commit-

ment of British brains, enterprise, and brawn to India and to trade in the

fabulous markets of the Moluccas and other islands was not at all counter-

balanced by d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition of reconnaissance in 1791.In this

theater as elsewhere, “the energy that had characterized French activity in

the mid-1780s was not maintained, and this activity was cut short by the

Revolutionary Wars.”17

It was clear, then, that as the European state system moved into the

1790s, no Brave New World of revolutionary idealism was going to quench

its competitive fires.What was more, the French, if initially immersed in

their great project of domestic reconstruction, would in time be reengaging

themselves in this competitive system, and with a vengeance.

Indeed, from the very beginning, as a phalanx of historians have attested,

the revolutionaries heralded such a turn of events by appealing to an inter-

national audience.Whether they were anathematizing the “feudal regime”

on 4–5 August 1789, enacting the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man

14 Citations from H.V.Evans, “The Nootka Sound Controversy in Anglo-French

Diplomacy – 1790,”
Journal of Modern History
, 46 (1974): 638–39.

15 Ibid., p. 638.

16 Black,
British Foreign Policy
, p.533.

17 Ibid., p. 254.

118

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

and Citizen several weeks later, or issuing some other pronunciamento, the

Constituent Assemblymen were in effect notifying their European con-

temporaries of what was soon to come.They drew all the more encourage-

ment to do so from political émigrés in Paris representing virtually every

oppressed national or ethnic group in Europe – and beyond.Victims of

Geneva’s aristocratic counterrevolution of 1762 rubbed elbows with more

recent refugees from the Low Countries, and these and other foreigners

edited their own news sheets, operated their own clubs, and adopted the

heady discourse of “national liberation.” Their incredible diversity was

spotlighted on 19 June 1790, when an applauding Constituent Assembly

received a delegation including Arabs, Chaldeans, Prussians, Poles, English,

Swiss, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Italians, Spaniards, Americans, Indians,

Syrians, Brabanters, Liègeois, Avignonnais, Genevans, Sardinians, Grisons,

and Sicilians!18 With such aggrieved patriots shouting slogans from the

galleries, and undoubtedly lobbying for their causes in less public venues

as well, is it any wonder that the men who were attempting to remake

France found themselves distracted from the very start by foreign affairs?

Even when they were not, perhaps, aware of doing so, the Assemblymen

raised issues of European import.The curtailment of “feudalism” in early

August 1789, we have seen, was directed primarily at a domestic audience

of insurrectionary peasants; but it also contravened prerogatives long con-

ceded to various princes of central Europe’s Holy Roman Empire.The

Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had confirmed the French crown’s hold on

the former imperial province of Alsace; yet it had also promised that the

ex-rulers in Alsace would forever enjoy title to certain “feudal” rights.But

now, in 1789, did not the “sovereign” National Assembly have the right to

break a royal treaty concluded in the benighted past and abrogate those ves-

tiges of feudalism in Alsace?19 Moreover, what implications would popular

sovereignty, once embraced by the Assembly, hold for future treaties nego-

tiated between France and other European polities, and for the continental

balance of power in general? To raise such questions could be immensely

subversive in a Europe whose wars and dynastic successions had, at one and

the same time, brought peoples of different languages, customs, and tradi-

tions together in entities called “states” and yet kept such peoples artificially

divided by internationally recognized boundaries.20 The “sovereignty of

the people,” once accepted as gospel in revolutionary France, could be ex-

ported all over Europe as “national self-determination” and might subvert

all existing public order within – and among – states.

These potentially explosive principles, invoked in connection with the

situation in Alsace, also motivated the Constituent Assemblymen to annex

18 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, pp.73–74.

19 Ibid., pp. 74–75.

20 Jacques Godechot,
France andthe Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century,
1770–1799
, trans.Herbert H.Rowen (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp.147–49.

The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution

119

Avignon and the Comtat-Venaissin, two papal territories enclosed within

France.In June 1790, subjects in both enclaves rose up against the papal

authorities and clamored for unification with revolutionary France.In both

cases, tellingly, the question of how sovereignty was to be legitimized was

debated at Paris, and this led to a sanctioning of self-determination as the

controlling principle of rightful sovereignty.It took some time before this

radical idea was fully spelled out and accepted, but the Assembly finally ap-

proved the annexation of Avignon and the Comtat-Venaissin in September

1791.Austria’s Mercy-Argenteau warned that by resolving the issue in

this manner the revolutionaries had “declared war on all other govern-

ments.”21 We can assume that Austria’s ambassador was similarly afflicted

when rebels in Savoy (a province of the king of Sardinia) and in several parts

of the Austrian Netherlands cited the notion of popular self-determination

as justification for their demand to be united to France.22

Yet there are good reasons for divining behind all of these territorial

controversies something even more fundamental than a clash between old

regime diplomatic legalism and revolutionary ideology.It is striking that

those governing France both before and during the Revolution shared

something of vital import with many of the kings, dukes, margraves, and

other rulers within the Holy Roman Empire: namely,
the desire to consoli-

date secular state power
.Administrative and juridical reforms implemented

by both Calonne and his immediate successor, Loménie de Brienne, during

the Prerevolution as part of their eleventh-hour efforts to salvage Bourbon

absolutism in France had already infringed upon the rights of the German

princes in Alsace and accordingly elicited reactions of outrage from the lat-

ter.In this sense, what the Constituent Assembly did in 1789 and thereafter

represented but a continuation of traditional policy in France.Especially

revealing in this connection was the manner in which the revolutionaries

handled the status of Avignon.Taking care to base their claim to this papal

enclave on historical precedent quite as much as on ideology (i.e., the

“right to self-determination”), the Assemblymen happily cited a decree

issued by – of all institutions! – the Parlement of Aix asserting French

rights to Avignon.We can see that what such a controversy erupting early

in the Revolution betokened was “not so much a conflict between historical

rights and national sovereignty as a conflict between historical rights and

state
sovereignty.” Indeed, how many of the German princes must have

ached to follow the French example of abolishing all outside pretentions

to jurisdiction!23 For here, again, was the larger point: Europe in the eigh-

teenth century was witnessing, on the local level, a consolidation of secular

state power.Could it have been otherwise, given (among other factors)